I still remember it well: I was at EGX 2015 in Birmingham, and one game turned my head like a doorknob. It wasn’t one of the blockbusters, or one of the games with a showy booth, but a much smaller game on a couple of screens, nestled among many others. On that screen was what looked to me like a pixel art fairytale. A person with a crown sat on top of a horse in a woodland area, with water in the foreground of the image that reflected the scene above. It seemed to breathe as I watched it. I was entranced. When I played it, the feeling intensified. There were no instructions about what to do in the game, so I had to feel it out, galloping left and right on my horse, collecting coins, then dropping them to do various, unexplained things. Then came night and strange creatures infiltrating my base, who stole my money and the crown I was wearing. I had to start again. What happened? I had no idea. But I knew I wanted to play again.
Smitten, I caught up with the person who was showing that game in a hotel bar later that day. They were from a company I had never heard of before that day, and they told me this was their first game. The company’s name, they said, was Raw Fury, and the game I had played was Kingdom: New Lands. Evidently, that encounter stuck with me, but I had no idea that nearly 10 years later I’d be at the studio’s HQ in Stockholm playing Kingdom all over again.
Kingdom remains as important to Raw Fury now as it was then. It underpins everything the boutique indie publisher does. Kingdom was actually created in 2010, before Raw Fury came along. Legend has it that Thomas van den Berg, AKA Noio, who created the game with Marcus Banacle, AKA Licorice, did so initially as a pixel art study in horse riding. Slowly, though, the game took on a semblance of side-on tower defence, and the identifiable cornerstones of Kingdom – expanding a base by picking up and dropping coins, defeating portals at the leftmost and rightmost edges of the map that enemies come from, and surviving the night – were introduced.
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